All my women, the adorable women with whom I have dreamed, have interested me. The naughty attraction that Nature has set between the two sexes, to perpetuate species, is excessively strong in me. But the idea of marriage horrifies me. If you hear someday that I have married, you’ll know that I have gone mad. For an artist, marriage is a misfortune. I want to get up everyday in a different state of mind, ready for new sensations; to marry would be to give up everything else in life. I have been around enough to have observed all the married artists in the world; well then, ninety eight out of a hundred are wretched and the other two cease to be an artist…

Do you know what I like best? To make a collection of all the happy moments, eternities, without ever stopping so they could replace the moments of disappointment. I don’t know whether I am making myself clear. I would like to leave of every woman and every friend at the highest moment of affection and never wait until the disenchantment comes. Some women strive for the impossible , for a permanent love, and in their stubbornness they merely attenuate love and happy memories, which are what one ought to aspire to. How long two people love each other is unimportant. What is unforgettable is the intensity with which they love. You can love a woman for forty years, but how? The divine part of that love, the only part that endures is the terrible and exalted madness of the first three weeks. All that remain are leftovers. One day in Venice, in perfect freedom, in the company of a women you’ve dreamt of, is worth more than the whole, prosaic lifetime of a marriage of convenience.

Funny words, coming from someone who would later marry and even have a another long domestic partnership with someone else. I guess there is always that unfathomable gap between our juvenile ideations, what we say to ourselves about ourselves, about who we are and what we do, and what we really do, what we objectively really are. Rubinstein’s words here are pure ideology, structured on a kind of fetishistic disavowal. In any case, this sort of teenagey, pseudo-Bohemian rhetoric has become so normative these days, a typical supplement to the capitalist injunction to “enjoy ourselves”, “realize our potential”, that marriage could actually end up becoming something transgressive, a real wager of existence. Maybe good old Arthur understood this in 1932 and then in 1977, or maybe he never did, because one can also realize that for a person loving himself so much, it might be difficult to love others… If not, just ask his daughters, who I personally know.